23 Email Personalization Best Practices for eCommerce – with Ed Hallen from Klaviyo

Considering email is typically the undisputed heavy weight revenue converter for most eCommerce companies, I thought you might appreciate this conversation I had with Ed Hallen from Klaviyo on email personalization best practices.

Sending smarter more personalized emails as opposed to spraying and praying is a complete art form. Tools such as Klavyio now allow any eCommerce business small or large to get knee deep in getting set up for email personalization.

However this interview gets stuck into the execution side of it all and best practices. Hopefully this conversation discussing some best practices will help you along your journey towards sending smarter more personalized emails to your customer list.

22.30 min – The main content elements to focus on and test for best results

33.27 min – Plain text vs templates. Which convert better?

Email Personalization Best Practices Highlights

Ed Hallen – 3 Content testing ideas

Video Transcript:

Daniel: If I’m looking to do some A/B testing like what’s, just from what you guys have seen through all of your clients, what are the big needle movers in testing content?

Ed: Yeah I think a couple things. I think one is you know don’t be scared of trying different things, and the very specific example is you know, plain text emails used in moderation. So you know if every tenth email you send is plain text and very personal those emails work really well. You can’t, if you keep using them they completely lose their impact and annoy people, but people kind of like that every once in a while. So that’s one. I think two is just, even just the basics of you know, kind of calls to action and making it really clear what that next step is can work really well too. Just you know make sure it’s clear what you want the person to do, make sure there’s a clear next step. If it’s a button click you know it’s something you’re telling them.

Daniel: Right and the message on the button is reflective of what’s about to happen next.

Ed: Right.

Daniel: Click here to return shopping, or click here to go back to the FAQ page and close your ticket, or whatever, but right.

Ed: Right yeah, and you know I think those are kind of easy basics, and I think those are really things that a lot of people aren’t doing, and are totally worth it. So you know those are the main things. I think the third thing we were just saying is just experiment, and I think it’s really easy to run an A/B test so you know, and if you’re sending newsletters your generally sending whether it’s one a week or two a week just split those up, try different ideas, try different subjects. kind of find your own voice that way and just see what things do and that kind of gets you comfortable with just, even if you’re not seeing a huge difference you’ll start to get used to always thinking about how someone’s reacting to this, and I’m trying, it’s like a puzzle you’re trying to solve. Like hey what’s going to be better for them that they’re going to like more and then respond to better?

Ed Hallen – The Top 3 Performing Personalization Programs

Video Transcript:

Daniel: I’m a big fan of the 80-20 rule. You know 80% of, hopefully of, all your revenue comes from 20% of the effort. You know, where is the 80% lie on the behavioral stuff? Like what are the top like five or six programs that are going to probably yield the best kind of results as starting points.

Ed: Right. I mean I think we would just take that down to just three and we’d just say it’s…

Daniel: Okay. Easy.

Ed: I mean those three aren’t. You see, but I think there is three points to purpose. It’s the welcome series which is, somebody shows up on your site, get them on your email list and you’ve got to be pro-active about that. You’ve got to make sure it’s very clear how they sign up. Then there is, you know, it’s the email series that gets them to make that first purchase. That’s kind of number one.

Number two is, you know, once they start to try to buy, you know some sort of abandoned cart or follow-up if I know someone is actually looking. And it’s the two or three emails that target those folks. And the third is just a wind back which is once you know you bought, you know, what’s the right time to reach out to buy again if you have a product that people can buy again and if you don’t, what’s the right time to reach out and make sure you tell somebody about the brand or about the product.

Daniel: Like the “Hey we miss you” type of message.

Ed: Exactly. And I think if you just focus on those three, even if you pick just one of those, all of those will drive impact right away. And you can kind of march down that list and then there is, you know, 10 or 15 others that are very important as well but they are not going to drive the same dollar impact that those guys do.

The Final Word

Quite a bit to digest from this call. Many email personalization best practices discussed, however my main point to anyone who does not yet have an abandoned cart program or a win back program or doing anything close to what I discussed with Ed, make a note in your calendar to at least find a starting point sometime sooner than later.

I have seen with my own eyes the benefit of implementing some very basic lifecycle email campaigns and with easy to implement tools like Klaviyo there is really no reason to dump it all into the “too hard basket.”